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British Official Calls Terror Threat ‘Very Substantial’

LONDON, Aug. 13 — Britain’s highest-ranking law enforcement official said Sunday that the threat of a terrorist attack here remained “very substantial,’’ and he disclosed that about two dozen major terrorist conspiracies were under investigation.

“There are still people out there who would carry out such attacks,’’ the official, Home Secretary John Reid, said, “The threat of a terrorist attack in the U.K. is still very substantial.’’

Four days after the British authorities announced that they had disrupted a plot to use liquid explosives to bomb up to 10 American-bound passenger jets, Britain was still on its highest level of alert, its airports in pandemonium because of heightened security measures.

In early morning raids last Thursday, the police rounded up 24 suspects and later freed one of them, leaving 23 in custody under counterterrorism laws permitting 28-day detention without charge. Of those, 22 were being questioned on Sunday while the status of the 23rd awaited a court ruling on Monday. In a BBC interview, Mr. Reid did not give details of any of the other conspiracies, but echoed earlier police assessments that British authorities had foiled four other plots since the London bombings on July 7, 2005.

The bombings brought Britons up short against the bloody reality of Islamic terrorism, made all the more chilling by the fact that the attacks then — like the suspects now — were mainly British-born Muslims. But the figure of 24 continuing investigations into other plots — far higher than had previously been made known — seemed bound to alarm many people whose lives have already been reshaped by new security regimes and what Prime Minister Tony Blair has called an ‘’elemental’’ battle with radical Islam.

At Heathrow airport, Europe’s busiest, airlines canceled almost one third of their flights on Sunday after a chaotic day on Saturday when many flights were canceled and some left half-empty because passengers were stuck in security lines awaiting body searches. Around 500 people spent the night camped out at the airport and, as torrential downpours drenched marquees erected as makeshift waiting areas on Sunday, attendants handed out pink, blue and transparent plastic hooded raincovers to keep passengers dry.

“It’s good they found the people,” said Verena Trommen, a 26-year-old German traveler, referring to the arrested suspects. “But this is just so hard.’’

Sobbing as she spoke to a reporter, she said she had arrived from Vancouver, Canada, and was trying to get home to Munich but her flight had been canceled and she would spend the night at Heathrow. “It’s a very bad end to a holiday,’’ she said. “It feels just like the war. It’s like a really bad movie.’’

One airline boss, Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of the low-cost carrier Ryanair, said the government “by insisting on these heavy-handed security measures is allowing the extremists to achieve many of their objectives.’’

Apparently seeking to bolster official denials of a link between terrorism and Britain’s alliance with the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. Reid said it was now known that Al Qaeda first tried to attack a British target in 2000. “So this has been a long-going threat but it is a chronic one and it is a severe one,’’ he said.

“We now think in retrospect that the first Al Qaeda plot, for instance, against this country preceded by quite awhile our intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan and actually preceded 9/11,’’ he said.

The remark seemed to be an indirect confirmation, for the first time, that the government saw the hand of Al Qaeda in the latest conspiracy, echoing stronger assertions by Pakistani officials.

Mr. Reid did not give details about the purported conspiracy in 2000 beyond saying it was uncovered in Birmingham, Britain’s second city which figured in the latest wave of arrests. One man seized there, Tayib Rauf, was said to be the brother of Rashid Rauf, a man captured by police in Pakistan whose arrest reportedly set off last week’s round-up of suspects.

Asked about a report in the British Sunday newspaper The Observer that police were hunting “two dozen’’ terror cells in Britain, Mr. Reid said: “I’m not going to confirm an exact number but I wouldn’t deny that that would indicate the number of major conspiracies that we are trying to look at. There would be more which are not at the center of our considerations and there may be more that we don’t know about at all.’’

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He also appeared to suggest that some conspirators associated with the plot disclosed last week may still be at large. “We believe it was a major, major plot,’’ he said, describing the police investigation as “ongoing.’’

“We believe we have the main targets,’’ he said, but did not rule out the idea that other people at large might still be planning an attack or “prepared to use this opportunity to carry out a terrorist attack.’’

While the government insists that last Thursday’s plot was real, some of its critics on Sunday started to question publicly the veracity of the government’s depiction of it, citing previous occasions — including an intelligence dossier used to justify the invasion of Iraq 2003 — when official assertions of a threat proved wrong.

Mr. Blair is on vacation in the Caribbean. His absence has been criticized by adversaries who say that if the plot was as serious as Mr. Reid and others maintain, he should return home. The threat of new attacks, as depicted by Mr. Reid, has sharpened an increasingly divisive debate over the links between home-grown Islamic terror attacks and Britain’s actions in the Muslim world. In a remarkable open letter on Saturday, 38 Islamic groups along with Muslim legislators and peers said British policies as an ally of the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere had provided “ammunition to extremists that threaten us all.’’

The letter drew an usually tart response by a phalanx of government ministers, including Mr. Reid who called it on Sunday a “dreadful misjudgment.’’

‘’We make decisions in this country by democracy, not under threat of terrorism,’’ Mr. Reid said.

David Davis, the home affairs spokesman of the opposition Conservatives, was more nuanced, acknowledging that Britain’s foreign policy might be “part of the catalyst’’ for terrorism.

“But to explain this is not to excuse it,’’ he said. “There are plenty of people with legitimate arguments with the government’s foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Lebanon and the Middle East. But none of them take the stance of attempting to murder many thousands of their fellow citizens.’’

Indeed, while the government has struggled to refute the suggestion that its foreign policy has fueled extremism, Muslim groups say they are not alone in opposing Mr. Blair’s policies in the Muslim world, where he has spoken of an “arc of extremism’’ challenging democratic values.

Hizb ut-Tahrir, a radical group that says it eschews violence in its quest for the revival of the Islamic caliphate, said in a statement on Sunday that the foreign policy concerns were “shared by Muslims and non-Muslims alike.’’ And it recalled an official assessment by the British security services in June 2005, that “events in Iraq are continuing to act as motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist-related activity in the U.K.’’

Two weeks after the July 7 bombings last year, when four suicide bombers killed 52 commuters on the London transport system, another group attempted what seemed a copycat attack that failed only when their explosives failed to detonate on subway trains and a bus.

Mr. Reid hinted the security clamp-down at airports may be eased, saying it was “time limited.’’ But he did not say when.

He also argued that the latest terror alert supported police demands for counterterrorism laws to be amended to permit detention without trial or charge for 90 days.